In defence of meat
I've suggested a few times that George Bush should be held accountable for his bio-ethanol policies but in yesterday's paper George Monbiot launched into a wholesale condemnation of meat eaters and suggested in no uncertain terms that it will be they who are responsible for any forthcoming global food crisis. I can see where he is coming from. Of the 2 billion tonnes of food produced, only half will be eaten directly by humans. 760 million tonnes will be fed to animals while a trifling 100 million tonnes goes towards biofuels for cars. He then goes on to talk about the inefficiencies of livestock farming using some fairly superficial figures to back it up. Beef, for example, is a complete nonstarter taking eight kilos of grain to produce a single kilo of meat. However, as I have boasted many times, our beef is fed almost exclusively on grass which humans can't digest. It might be possible to feed the population of the UK on a vegan diet using only half the land area but at present, 75% of it is covered with grass, much of it on ground too steep or wet for much else. Animals also play an important part in most crop rotations and certainly make maintaining fertility without chemical fertilizers a great deal easier.

The article did end on a more reasonable note with Monbiot suggesting divvying up the primary food resources fairly, in a vegetarian manner, and then using the surplus for a bit of gratuitous, luxury, meat production. I don't think many would dispute that this is a fair approach - but how? With food riots on three continents (working on the fairly safe assumption that there has been one in Africa as well as Haiti and the Philippines) food security is this week's buzz phrase. I don't think it is going to get any better and I can't see how the powers that be are going to sort it out. Sadly, it will almost certainly be down to market forces which, when we are talking about peoples lives, is not very reassuring.

On to a happier, more cheerful note...
Following a visit to the annual Taste of the West show at Westpoint we have a whole list of new local products. If you get out and around you will probably have seen Teoni's Oat Cookies in other farm shops. They are slightly similar to Anzac biscuits. I have always liked them but I kept on thinking that one day we would make our own. Predictably, it hasn't happened so I might as well admit defeat. Teoni's, from Henyock, make a range of fantastic chunky biscuits. Jenny, in our office, described them as a man's biscuit, but so what? At £2.25 for a 300g pack they are great value compared with most of our 'artisan' biscuits.

Cornish Sea Salt, from the Lizard, has had good press and tastes equally impressive. The website says it contains at least sixty naturally occurring trace elements. The only British salt harvested straight from the sea, it is similarly crunchy to Maldon sea salt. Rather than using natural evaporation they have developed a top secret method of electrolysis to turn the water into salt. That's all they would tell me - but it certainly tastes good. Salt is set to become something of a battle ground in the health v real food debate. Twenty years ago we were watching Ben Kingsley, as a gesture of independence, set up camp on Indian salt flats in the film 'Gandhi' but now we are told not to eat more than 7g a day. At a recent talk in Totnes on the dreaded 'Codex Alimentarius' the example of people being told to drink half a glass of sea water a day as a preventative measure was, very sensibly, sited. Rough reckoning says that is equivalent to our recommended daily intake but it is supposed to be good for us!! I suppose it all comes round to the same old story; don't eat processed food, almost invariably high in salt lacking sixty, naturally occurring trace elements, and do eat what mother earth throws at us. Sounds good to me but probably not my children. We are also looking at cheese and olives from Cranbourne Chase Dairy and Olives et al in Dorset but more next time.

Also new, and probably a one off, are Skrubá vegetable scrubbing gloves. £3.99 seemed like a gamble worth taking with new potato season just around the corner. Of course they are much too dainty to fit on my massive plate like hands but that doesn’t mean they won’t fit somebody in the house.

The cold nights have held it up but Kitley asparagus has finally arrived. I will have to dig out my recipe for asparagus risotto. Let’s hope for some warm weather to make up for a slow start to the season which, don’t forget, always ends on June 21st.

Ben Watson